Electric automobiles are the most simple of all the self-propelled
vehicles. The current stored in the batteries is simply turned off and
on the motors, or the pressure reduced by means of resistance which
obstructs the flow, and therefore the power, of the current. To reverse,
it is only necessary to change the direction of the current's flow; and
in order to stop, the connection between motor and battery is broken by
a switch.

Electricity is the ideal power for automobiles. Being clean and easily
controlled, it seems just the thing; but it is expensive, and sometimes
hard to get. No satisfactory substitute has been found for it, however,
in the larger cities, and it may be that creative or "primary" batteries
both cheap and effective will be invented and will do away with the one
objection to electricity for automobiles.

The astonishing things of to-day are the commonplaces of to-morrow, and
so the achievements of automobile builders as here set down may be
greatly surpassed by the time this appears in print.

The sensations of the locomotive engineer, who feels his great machine
strain forward over the smooth steel rails, are as nothing to the almost
numbing sensations of the automobile driver who covered space at the
rate of eighty-eight miles an hour on the road between Paris and Madrid:
he felt every inequality in the road, every grade along the way, and
each curve, each shadow, was a menace that required the greatest nerve
and skill. Locomotive driving at a hundred miles an hour is but mild
exhilaration as compared to the feelings of the motor-car driver who
travels at fifty miles an hour on the public highway.